4 ms·

I do not know exactly what a baseball bat for tennis is. I have some assumptions as an amateur player and following television over the years about why 1HB is n

by braza 3y ago

I do not know exactly what a baseball bat for tennis is. I have some assumptions as an amateur player and following television over the years about why 1HB is not a thought anymore. No one is teaching 1HB anymore. Along the way, I went to several tennis schools, and it's quite hard to find a coach that offers training as a 1HB, most of the time because the person is a 2HB himself or herself or does not know what it takes to train a 1HB. The training itself is tougher. I had a coach who said that for every person that chose 1HB, he demanded at least 600 shots in the tennis wall in comparison with 200 of the 2HB, and with the game being as complex as it is in several other disciplines (footwork, volley, baseline, physical training), the least thing that you can do is to have almost 1 hour extra of training for a single shot. With the game becoming slower, 1HB became a honeypot for lefty players who could explore it a lot and baseline players who would return every single stroke. When people used to play on the carpet, one average player serving an American twist or a flat on the line made it very hard for a 2BH to return due to the speed and anticipation needed. Today we have 2HB returning 150 MPH serves.

AndrewDavis 3y ago
> The training itself is tougher. I had a coach who said that for every person that chose 1HB, he demanded at least 600 shots in the tennis wall in comparison with 200 of the 2HB, and with the game being as complex as it is in several other disciplines (footwork, volley, baseline, physical training), the least thing that you can do is to have almost 1 hour extra of training for a single shot. This is definitely true. You can get away with poorer technique and still have an ok-ish two-handed backhand because (and i'm heavily simplifying it here) you're using stronger muscles groups. There are some exceptions. Some people such as myself are profoundly uncoordinated in their non dominant arm, and after playing with a two-handed backhand my entire childhood it still sucked. It took only a few months to go from never having hit a one-handed backend to it eclipsing my two-hander in reliability (context i was ~15 hours a week, so it was still a lot of time commitment). Would it have been better if i'd made the change as a child? Maybe it would have been a lot better, or maybe it would have been a lot worse because i wouldn't have had the physical development and/or the discipline to focus on the fundamentals of the technique at 12 years old versus the age i did change at 19.

by braza 3y ago

AndrewDavis 3y ago

> The training itself is tougher. I had a coach who said that for every person that chose 1HB, he demanded at least 600 shots in the tennis wall in comparison with 200 of the 2HB, and with the game being as complex as it is in several other disciplines (footwork, volley, baseline, physical training), the least thing that you can do is to have almost 1 hour extra of training for a single shot. This is definitely true. You can get away with poorer technique and still have an ok-ish two-handed backhand because (and i'm heavily simplifying it here) you're using stronger muscles groups. There are some exceptions. Some people such as myself are profoundly uncoordinated in their non dominant arm, and after playing with a two-handed backhand my entire childhood it still sucked. It took only a few months to go from never having hit a one-handed backend to it eclipsing my two-hander in reliability (context i was ~15 hours a week, so it was still a lot of time commitment). Would it have been better if i'd made the change as a child? Maybe it would have been a lot better, or maybe it would have been a lot worse because i wouldn't have had the physical development and/or the discipline to focus on the fundamentals of the technique at 12 years old versus the age i did change at 19.